Only a half hour from Cormòns, Aquileia is another world. A Roman world. Once you come here you cannot imagine why you’ve never heard of it—one of the great sights of Italy, of anywhere.
Founded in 181 B.C., Aquileia is a sleepy village of thirty-five hundred. Once, its population was as many as one hundred thousand, the fourth largest in Italy after Rome, Milano, and Capua. First established as a military bastion against barbarians, the settlement grew large as Rome expanded toward the Danube. Rome recognized its position on strategic roads, and saw that boats could ply the river to the Adriatic outlet. Trade eventually extended as far north as the Baltic amber routes and as far east as Arabia.
Entering town on via Giulia Augusta, you immediately see on the left a spectacular row of fourteen tall intact columns, plus a few stubs and bases, hints at what once stood there. The whole site is like this: Everywhere you wander, you come upon remnants of forum, circus, port, town wall, houses with bits of mosaic floor, amphitheater, all unguarded, open, just lying around among the cypresses, pines, and long grass, as though just unearthed. There must be much left to discover. As many ruins as I’ve seen, I’ve never, with the exceptions of tourist-central Pompeii and Herculaneum, felt the living reality of the town as I do here. The way it existed eerily rises in the mind’s eye.
AFTER ROMAN RULE ended, Aquileia was subject to sieges, fratricides, martyrs, and plagues. The Christian patriarch Theodore built a basilica in 314. Attila destroyed the town in 452 and salted the earth. He left in his wake the legend that fleeing citizens forced slaves to construct a well that they filled with treasures; then they killed the slaves to erase memory. Fallen to ruin, the basilica was reworked from 1021 to 1031. After: a dizzying succession of power grabbers, patriarchs, earthquakes, and extraordinary artistic triumphs.
THE MUSEO ARCHEOLOGICO Nazionale di Aquileia, housed in a large villa, beggars description. Everything here was excavated locally. The cemeteries must have been like museums. The signage tells us that funeral monuments were arranged along roads leading into town: sepulchral roads organized according to social order. We get to see quantities of finely executed marble busts that marked the graves. Stone lions—protectors of tombs—from the first century B.C. A head of Venus. A headless, armless whole Venus, tall, realistic. A Janus face. Decoratively carved sarcophagi for those buried whole, cinerary urns for cremated bodies, with carved scenes like film strips encircling the urn. A dead man is shown nude lying on a bed. Ah, here’s a surprise: Across from him, another man makes the sign of the corna. Index and pinkie pointed down, like bull’s horns, the gesture that all over Italy means let it not happen here. The floors of black-and-white mosaics, exquisite, lifted from houses in the area. Fragments show scenes from the Iliad. One of the Trojan war, and a vast wave about to subsume all. Useless to catalog; you must see.
The marble portrait busts make me linger longest. Real faces. Full of lived life. One, very old. One, a boy with an ivy wreath. Delicate young woman with corn-row hair; most of the women show elaborate hair. Some have smashed noses. We’re alone here with these former citizens. Conversing.
In the garden, we find the lapidarium, an immense salvage yard of Roman stones—tombstones, stone carvings, bits of buildings, monument markers, stele, round pots for ashes of slaves. And more mosaics. Ed is photographing the carved, precise Roman lettering, no font ever as pleasing to the eye. Jumbled storerooms off the loggia are jammed with pots and glass objects—major craft of ancient Aquileia—surprisingly enduring all this time. Coins, of course. All speaking loudly of vibrant life.
NOT FAR AWAY, we’re in a later era. The basilica, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, hid a secret for almost a thousand years. Imagine the surprise of Austrian archeologists in the early twentieth century when they lifted the eleventh-century floor and found under deeper layers of straw and mud the intact mosaic of the 314 church. What a moment.
This is the largest mosaic surviving from the ancient world. Traveler, this is why we find ourselves in places we never dreamed of! Scenes of the Old Testament surge across the huge floor. What is moving: You sense the presence of the maker. The person who picked up stone after stone and formed images of the allegories, stories, and symbols from early Christian times. Daily moments, too: a man sleeping under a pergola, a swimming octopus, many animals. Oh, Jonah and the whale, and the pagan Perseus, the winged horse. Fishermen—the Apostles?—wielding a somehow transparent net. I identify many types of fish, which speak of the citizens’ riverside life.
THE WELL OF treasure was never found. For centuries, any property sales contract excluded buyers from the wealth inside the well if it were later discovered on the land. I’m dreaming. When I win the jackpot lottery, I’ll fund a crack team of archeologists to uncover what must still lie under the earth. Magnificent sculptures, a preserved kitchen, a chariot. In an undiscovered dip of the ground, they’ll come upon an octagonal stone, and when they lift it, they’ll look down into the golden well.